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Takeaways from Hogwarts Legacy
superhero6785
Member
So Hogwarts Legacy is incredible. It has a 9/10 rating on Steam and a 95% Google users rating. It's objectively loved by millions. It would be a huge oversight to NOT analyze what things Ashes can takeaway from HL. I understand they are two different genres, but what things do you love about HL that you'd like to see Ashes take inspiration from?
My thoughts:
1. Combat feels great and snappy. Animations look nice, they're impactful, but are not over the top.
2. Graphics & animations look all around amazing. If AoC comes anywhere near this level of fidelity I'd be so happy.
3. Spell bar / pages is designed to work well for console players. I know Ashes isn't targeting console, but something to throw in the back pocket just in case?
4. The attention to detail in the explorable world is top tier. Just running around exploring is immersive.
If it were up to me, I'd give the whole staff a 3 day gamecation and make Hogwarts Legacy "required reading"
What are your takeaways from HL?
My thoughts:
1. Combat feels great and snappy. Animations look nice, they're impactful, but are not over the top.
2. Graphics & animations look all around amazing. If AoC comes anywhere near this level of fidelity I'd be so happy.
3. Spell bar / pages is designed to work well for console players. I know Ashes isn't targeting console, but something to throw in the back pocket just in case?
4. The attention to detail in the explorable world is top tier. Just running around exploring is immersive.
If it were up to me, I'd give the whole staff a 3 day gamecation and make Hogwarts Legacy "required reading"
What are your takeaways from HL?
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Comments
Hogwarts Legacy has combat with wands.
Ashes of Creation has combat with wands.
Hogwarts legacy lets you play a wizard.
Ashes of Creation lets you play a Mage (which is just another word for wizard in this context).
There's a lot of inspiration you can draw from that. I mean, I mostly played a wand-using Mage in Alpha 1, and the animations reminded me a bit of the Harry Potter films, so I already saw a bit of a parallel.
This.
It's always the details, especially now.
In the end, MMOs are going to be only a question of who has the best systems and network implementations. So while there's definitely some stuff you could look at, it kinda doesn't matter, the things mentioned in the OP are basically 'standard' already.
You can actually ignore the video as it's just a random 'support of my point'.
At this point, while I normally hate to agree with the way this is normally approached, I think it's fair to ask it too... how does 'learning about standard level implementations of stuff' influence Ashes, really? Are we somehow assuming that these industry veteran game devs aren't already versed in all this?
You can't copy a single player games graphics and just replicate it in an MMO. Hogwarts Legacy has 1 player it needs to render clothing and spells for and even then HL was quite laggy in terms of FPS drops for me and I have a 3080. Ashes is planning to have a minimum of 500 players in fights with the goal of 1000.
The only other thing may be the vivarium and room of requirement relating to freehold, but they are very basic in HL, however satisfying.
AoC will never and should never have the same visual fidelity as AAA single player games this is simply not realistic for an MMO with +500 player battles
intrepid is already pushing the max they can with visuals while focusing on performance, all their assets and visuals Need to be performant first, pretty second
this needs to be acknowledged by the player base
You don't think an MMO should ever be able to dynamically scale visual fidelity for when you are alone in a forest fighting monsters, and then seamlessly switch to performance visuals as more and more players enter the scene? Wow, perhaps I just have higher hopes for the future of visual tech deployed in an MMO...I'm by no means demanding the visuals match a AAA single player title, I'm just saying what HL has would be a nice target, even if it's only achieved when there's nobody else around (or perhaps with a few friends). #DreamBig
I'm sure with a system like that you could turn it off in the settings and simply choose the "standard" (reduced) graphics all the time. Things like that already exist for games like Call of Duty. It's called dynamic something, basically you can set a target FPS and it will adjust your graphics accordingly so you maintain a target FPS. The technology exists today, and you can turn it on and off.
At max I think you get 16 spells in four bars. You cannot hotkey specific spells on different bars. Hotkeys only point to your active/on screen bar. Boo.
I think this is a bit of a silly take. Inspiration and design considerations can be collected from a wide range of sources. I think it is a bit churlish to say that nothing can be learned from what is objectively a very good game. The world-building and interiors are excellent and whilst the graphical fidelity is above that expected in an MMO, the ambiance and mood achieved by the developers are admirable.
Other systems in the game like the UI, menu and quest logs are also really nice. I like what we are seeing with the direction of Ashes UI so far, but I do hope that it keeps some of that RPG, magical, old-school adventurer charm that I feel is lacking in the likes of New World.
Audio queues are S-tier in Hogwarts as well. Having impactful little audio queues to match with specific actions are great (if not over done)
They rly missed the mark with that game. Loved the books, liked the movies, played the PS1 games, but me and the people that were the same age as Harry Potter arent 15 anymore.
I gave up on it after 4 hours. And trust me, I was looking forward to its release.
Singleplayer games need to stop trying to suck players into endless hours by pretending to be mmos. Very few singleplayer games have managed that. The rest become very boring very soon, with only the mainstory being enjoyable.
Not many people want the endless side Qs and repetitive points of interest for a slim chance to find a "diamond in the rough" encounter.
Singleplayers should be structured with some sense of world travel and mmos should be unrestrictive and made for player to player interactions.
Ok...
Only 80,000 people on steam have reviewed Hogwarts on Steam and it's at 93% and anyone on Google is allowed to review Hogwarts Legacy without needing the game. The game is not really catering to extreme biases and there are a lot of mad Harry Potter fans, so the high google review is of no surprise, also bearing in mind most users reviewing it will likely be younger than 25 with quite a small catalogue of gaming experience.
In contrast Terraria is reviewed by 900k people on Steam with a 97% review but I see no thread calling for inspiration from this game.
1. "Wand Slinging" and spell casting has very high attack speed which quite easily makes the user feel overpowered, even more so infinite mana and only very minor cooldowns.
It's fast food/cheap thrills entertainment, pretty good but it doesn't break any boundaries for depth of gameplay and reward for skilled management. There are no charging attacks in the game, quite unimpressive for a Wizard/casting game.
2. Graphics wise it's pretty decent for a high budget game, floor tiles looking very nice with shine/rtx but otherwise nothing we haven't seen before.
3. "Feels good with pad" gameplay is expected for a high budget games that focus on consoles at launch. There have been more gameplay mechanical options from other games such as Devil May Cry and Tekken though.
4. Attention to detail in the world is top tier? The outside is everything you would expect from a fresh british forest with hills and mountains included so that's good to a degree. What does "Top tier" mean though, just purely the amount of assets used? How does that translate into interactions exactly, in Breathe of the wild you can chop tree's, cook, hunt animals and use many rocks and tree's for advantages for combat and life benefits.
What exactly is this game doing that is different that is worth discussing?
Well besides being a "typical" AAA game, that mainly focuses on being a "movie with selected interactions" + certain areas made for some pve action and mini games + decent voice acting, the only thing I can see to take from Hogwarts is the REPAIR SPELL (looks great seeing assets come back together!) and how that can be used in a game that focuses much more so on gameplay and co-op/online.
Maybe instead being over captivated by a fresh game you can start looking at things a bit more critically and start to appreciate gameplay features and mechanics from older games!
that's incorrect, they've talked about default character appearances, that's two different things
No, and I think this would be a terrible terrible idea, I've never seen anything similar to this in an MMORPG, I think people are misunderstanding what "default player appearance" is
they are basically doing what archeage has - your character skin changes, and that's it
automatically changing the graphics quality is not a thing, and shouldn't be a thing - AoC is an open world game, imagine every time a guild passes by with 100 people or every time you walk in a node your graphics changed, this would be a really bad experience
Debatable, your experience with a game doesn't mean it is shared, I'm not a fan.
These points talking about combat to spell bar, to things working on console. As well as honeymoon phase of exploring just cause its a new open world game... Not for me and not a fan. My opinion isn't silly.
He is having honeymoon phase and is projecting this game on other games now.
Exactly. Like the echoing sounds of distant players grunting, fighting, chopping trees. One good thing about New World.
... not an MMO.
Now, this may sound like a slapstick comment, but it really is not.
Hogwarts Legacy is a singleplayer game. From both a game development and technical point of view, there is a massive difference between developing a SP and an MMO.
Everything that is really really hard to solve, is tied in to the fact that it is a MMO.
While Hogwarts may be a good game, it really isn't innovating much.
Furthermore, the love for the game stems from the impact the IP had on young minds more than anything else.
That being said, there is nothing wrong in looking to other games for inspiration.
But asking a fairly ambitious MMO-development project to look to a singleplayer game for combat inspiration is ... well, there are few if any takeaways for the dev team.
It would be like comparing a picture to a working physical model.
Sure, the flying vehicle on the picture looks really good - but we cannot build it like that, because physics.
It is basically LOD for characters, a gameplay feature that has been around for decades.
Level of Detail (or LOD) is a solution to hardware tax in computer games with high fidelity graphics, where assets further away have a lower detail model to replace the high detail model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_detail_(computer_graphics)
Miminal loading screens exploring Hogwarts.
Exploration the open world was fun but only due to having flying mounts. We won't have them in AoC.
The quests, character development, build diversity and complexity all lacked depth. AoC should not replicate.
The puzzle spam in that game was abysmal. It was a very cheap mechanism to fill the world with clutter that slowed us down but didn't add to the game. I'd AoC goes the puzzle bloat game play route or loot box spam like New World did or Hogwarts Legacy did with Alohamora and their caves. The loot box rat game play is so stale imo.
HL rode the IP pretty hard as the game lacks depth but Hogwarts and Hogsmeade were done very well. They clearly spent the bulk of their development time on those areas to do right by Harry Potter which was smart for its style of game but it would not be appropriate for an mmo to release with so little game play or content.
HL shared too much kid gameplay for pre-teens. A lot of it felt like I was playing the cartoon Disney collection game coming out in game content. They went overboard on the low quality content types. The game is enjoyable early on and dwindles pretty hard and has very little replay value.
you are literally just hating all along. "combat was weak imo" but not stating why.
Guess you had to react too much hahaha and you rather like to spamm and turn your brain off as already stated below my discussion.
Also it was laggy not because of too high requirements but because of poor optimization.
Also imagine with UE 5.1 and its new render system.
But who am I, just keep hating all OP's with your nonsense.
There are plenty of points AOC can draw inspiration from HL just like they have drawn inspo from 15 other games. Let's be real.
Some of ya'll just sound so miserable sometimes...